The present invention relates generally to the field of data communication and networking, and more particularly to methods, systems, and computer program products that communicate within a Central Electronic Complex (CEC) and between CECs InfiniBand™ and RDMA over Enhanced Converged Ethernet (RoCE) provide support for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) technology are existing, known technologies for high speed connectivity between hosts and servers. InfiniBand is a trademark of the InfiniBand Trade Association. These technologies are implemented in a networking environment with additional hardware and corresponding software, including drivers and application programming interfaces. This means that using these high-speed technologies requires server programs, applications, and clients to code to specific low level APIs to exploit them. For example, instead of sockets, User Direct Access Programming Library (UDAPL) would be used to communicate using InfiniBand.
There is an existing base of hardware vendors that provide RDMA capable Network Interface Cards or Adapters (RNICs) that allow the software device driver or upper layer protocol to directly exploit the adapter hardware using low layer (IB) verbs via the platform's PCIe architecture. The verb interfaces are based on Queue Pair technology. RDMA capable network switches are also required. There also exist a base of switch vendors that provide RDMA capable switches for both IB or RoCE network fabrics. Collectively the (PCIe based) adapters, switches and the host based verb interfaces all provide the ability for each host to exploit RDMA solutions. The RDMA technology in conjunction with the IB (or RoCE) wire protocol allows each host to register memory with the adapter and then directly write or read into the remote's host memory. This (remote) direct access to a peer host's memory (via low level verbs) along with a high level communications protocol together provide for a very efficient means of communications among remote hosts that are clustered together attached to the same RDMA capable network fabric.
There is also an existing and growing set of hypervisor based solutions that provide the ability to create virtual server images on the same physical compute platform. In many cases the hypervisor can support hundreds of active virtual servers. The problem then becomes how the hypervisors can efficiently virtualize the RDMA capabilities for the virtual servers on the same platform. The existing solution allows the hypervisor to exploit the virtualization provided by the RNIC adapter vendor (referred to as Single Root-I/O Virtualization or SR-IOV). The adapter virtualization requires that the hypervisor use the hardware adapter and the PCIe interface for connectivity within a single platform. This solution can become costly and induce bottlenecks within the platform.